Both prices and the volatility of storable agricultural commodity futures contracts have been rising since 2005 and particularly since 2007. This paper aims to answer two principal questions: (i) How has the behavior of these futures prices over time and across maturities changed with the rise...

Long memory, and more precisely fractionally integration, has been put forward as an explanation for the persistence of shocks in a number of economic time series data as well as to reconcile misleading findings of unit roots in data that should be stationary. Recent evidence suggests that long...

Commodity cash and futures prices have been rising steadily since 2006. As evidenced by the April 2008 Commodity Futures Trading Commission Agricultural Forum, there is much concern among traditional futures and options market participants that the usefulness of commodity derivatives has been...

Commodity and energy prices have exhibited an unprecedented increase between October 2006 and July 2008, only to fall sharply during the last months of 2008. Many explanations have been offered to this phenomenon, including steadily increasing demand from China and India, large mandated...

The commodity bull cycle of 2006-2008 and subsequent dramatic price decline have been asource of hardship for traditional commodity market participants such as producers andmerchant/shippers. The usefulness of futures markets has been called into question, especiallygiven that some market...

Interest is growing in weather insurance within the agricultural sector but its use has been limited by the difficulty in defining the appropriate weather event and the lack of agreement on how to price the product. In this paper we develop a new insurance pricing method for weather insurance...

This paper developed an economic framework to analyze the economic impacts of an ECP on trade flows within the context of a partial equilibrium approach which assumes that non-payment risks are distinct between selling at home and abroad based on difficulties and expense in recovering...

In this paper we develop a theoretical model of input supply by agricultural producers who purchase crop insurance and so who may engage in moral hazard. We show, through simulations, that a combination of partial insurance coverage combined with a mnimum standard for input use may reduce...

This paper argues that under a commercial export milk program the market value of quota will be determined by the spread between the domestic market price and the export price rather than the conventional wisdom that it is determined by the spread between the domestic milk price and the marginal...

When considering the possibility of a bioterrorist attack on the United States food system it is generally agreed that U.S. agriculture is vulnerable to such an attack. In addition to the importance of being able to predict the likelihood of such an event and thereby attempt to prevent it, it is...